Tsk, yesterday, I was in a such a rush that I post a piece that I had posted the week before. So, here is a different piece on Ireland. First posted Oct. 14, 2007 on Blogspot

Now that I’ve been back for a few days, I’m starting to sort through my pictures. Dublin was the first real landing spot in Ireland. So of course there are many shots of the streets and the housing, which differs from Vancouver. Architectural history, barring the earlier dwelling of the coastal other indigenous people (and not many of those remain due to the deterioration of wood and leather) in most of Canada goes back about three hundred years. Yes, there are a few exceptions like bits of a Viking settlement in Newfoundland or the 16th century Basque whaling village, but all in all, our civic history is relatively young. So Dublin like many European cities has history steeped in history that can be seen in the shape of the streets and the buildings.

The link listed here connects to my photos of Dublin, with the exception of the two fox pictures from my friends’ back yard in Glasgow (where we first landed). Foxes are the local vermin in Glasgow but protected there now. Some of the pictures I’ve included are fuzzy. I was still learning the digital camera and in some cases the lighting was very low but I have them here out of interest.

Dublin’s one day included a trip to Christchurch Cathedral. Parts of it date back a thousand years. Some of the tile work is still beautiful and holds up well after thousands of feet walking over them and hundreds of years. Some of the tiles are originals. Others were redone in the 1700s. Interestingly there was a glass encased, mummified rat and cat, found in an organ that had been restored. Who was chasing whom, we may never know. We also went to the famous Temple Bar area, which is trendy but has some interesting pubs and restaurants. We ate at Fitzers which was very good and not that cheap. A drink of rum and coke and a cider cost about 15 Euros in Dublin. It’s 1.5 dollars CDN to the Euro. Dublin is supposed to be the most expensive city in Europe right now.

We also went to Dublin Castle, which like many structures has many centuries of history and more modern parts built on the remains of the older places. Still used today by Ireland’s president (who serves a seven-year term) the rooms are of 17th-18th century designs. Under the buildings are excavated ruins of the original walls and towers. We were told that they used to take the heads of the executed and stick them on pikes about the castle. Eventually the heads would rot and plop into the moat. How do they know this? Well, they found four hundred severed heads in the moat. Which spawned this drinking song that you can sing to “99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

Ninety-nine severed heads in the moat, ninety-nine severed heads.
You take one out, you toss it about, ninety-eight severed heads in the moat. At which point, you could take a sip of said beverage and pass it down the line. More than ninety-nine heads though and it gets quite ungainly to sing. My sister and I had the opportunity to sing through all the heads to zero while stuck in rush-hour traffic in Cork. It kept us amused and even if our windows were open a bit, the people stuck in traffic beside us studiously ignored us.

Last was wandering around the River Liffey. This bisects south and north of the city. There are various car and foot bridges over the river and the areas between are called quays, such as Merchants quay, which gives you an idea of what it must once have been like before the advent of cars.